Chapter 9: Arkansas Or Bust







     "Lewy, Jesse, Jimmy, come see off your papaw!"

So decrees Charity Reed to her grandsons by way of summoning the whole household to the front porch on a foggy All Hallow's Eve morning.

It was fifty-three years to the day since a red-headed overmountain man had sat down to her dumb supper plate at the Green homestead in Albemarle.

"Me and Jesse come too, papaw?" Lewis calls as he runs down the wooden stairs toward the loaded oxcart only to be collared by his mother Patsy, her other arm holding baby James. 





     Benjamin was departing Cow Creek for the eight-hundred mile journey west accompanied by eldest son James, his wife Alicy, and their three children. Their path out of eastern Kentucky would take them on the Wilderness Road up to Louisville where they'd sell the oxcart and horse for passage on a steamboat bound for St. Louis. There they'd purchase a Conestoga wagon and team for the Southwest Trail across the Ozarks into the foothills of central Arkansas. They would not be alone on the westward trails.

     President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 initiated the forcible removal of Cherokee communities in North Carolina and Tennessee. Even before the forced march of sixteen-thousand people in 1838 that came to be known as the Trail of Tears, small groups living in the Appalachians of western Virginia and Kentucky had embarked on their own for grasslands set aside for Native Americans in the western half of Arkansas Territory.





     "Tend your mamaw while I'm gone," Benny enjoins the twins standing between Charity and Patsy as he gives his legs a little squeeze to tell the old white quarter horse to begin walking.

"Always a full plate for an old mule," Charity calls, waving with the others as the oxen plod off behind the horse.

"That's the only table setting I'll ever need," he brays as the little cavalcade ambles west along Reed Branch.

As he turns ahead into the chilly mist, Benjamin Reed, still hale at age seventy-two, just glimpses a reddish streak loping along in the woods beside the trail.




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